Smartphone camera apps speed check deposits

G. Bradley, owner of Plymouth heating and cooling company Beantown AC, saves a few trips to the bank each week using his smartphone’s mobile banking application to take pictures of customer checks and instantly deposit them with Rockland Trust.

“It’s honestly one of the best services since the ATM,” said Bradley, who has two employees, works 12 hours a day and doesn’t have a lot of time left over to do administrative work. “It really keeps me from having to go to the bank at all. I can get my checks into the bank in a day or two, and it’s minimized the amount of bounced checks I have to deal with. It’s really streamlined the process.”

More Massachusetts banks and credit unions are offering mobile check deposits, letting customers use their mobile phones to take pictures paper checks to deposit money. Under the system, a phone sends to the bank electronically the deposit amount and the check’s routing and deposit numbers. The deposit can be posted to the account within minutes.

Marlborough-based Digital Federal Credit Union has more than 70,000 of its 354,000 members signed up for mobile check cashing. On March 23, DCU the surpassed the $1 billion dollar mark in remote deposits, which included both checks scanned using a home computer as well as smartphone deposits. Last year, more than 439,000 checks were processed via mobile check deposit.

The service is “relatively inexpensive” for the bank to offer, said DCU spokesman John LaHair. Expenses include developing the software and paying the processing vendor, Burlington-based Vertifi Software LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Eastern Corporate Federal Credit Union (EasCorp).

“It’s a way to not only capture money but to capture hearts and minds. Who doesn’t like the convenience to be able to literally point and click and deposit their check?” LaHair said. “It saves time and money, and they have almost immediate access to their funds in less than two minutes rather than wait for a check to be delivered and deposited manually. It not only saves money on our end, but saves money on the consumer end.”

Vertifi provides the software to the credit unions through its DeposZip product. “We have a growing pipeline of banks interested in this and who are signing on,” said Alan Bernstein, Vertifi’s president. “This is a very, very popular technology in the banking community. It’s almost certainly what we’re staying focused on selling and getting everybody on.”

A study sponsored by the Federal Reserve, released in April 2011, found the use of paper checks in the U.S. fell 7.1 percent since 2006 as electronic payments, or those made with plastic cards, exceeded three-quarters of all noncash payments. Check payments accounted for less than a quarter of all noncash payments.

Rockland Trust’s mobile banking program, introduced last February, now has 3,700 customers, many of those business owners. The service is free with an account.

“We have a lot of business customers using it,” said Rockland Trust’s Jane Lundquist, retail banking and corporate marketing director.

“We’re one of the first to really offer it in the business segment. It’s part of our overall commitment to providing a best-in-class customer experience, and that is just part of that.”